Thoughts on Awards

April 10, 2015

This post is about the Hugo fracas, but it’s also about awards in general.

If you don’t know about the current brouhaha regarding this year’s Hugo Award nominees, I’d recommend that for your own sanity you don’t read the rest of this post and go do something more fun. Like read a book, for example.

If you still want to know what’s what, you could do worse than read George R.R. Martin’s well-reasoned explanation and opinion. Of course, it’s long, written in many parts and not finished yet. But still —go do that. I’ll wait. The first part is here and it continues with subsequent posts.

So. Awards. I strongly dislike popular vote awards. They inherently reward campaigning, slates and bloc voting. And, not to put too fine a point on it, popular works already enjoy the natural rewards of popularity: eyeballs, pageviews, buzz and sales. I frankly don’t get the point of having an award for popularity. It’s double-dipping, But, they exist and like everything else in the universe that isn’t my personal ideal, my options are to participate and try to change things for the better if possible, or just opt out.

The Hugos are part of my community, part of my business. I might not like the way they are structured, but they are what they are. If I participated in the past (which I have done) I can’t opt out now just because some if their inherent flaws have been made obvious.

Any system that requires adherence to unwritten rules in order to function properly is broken from inception. All straight popular vote awards open themselves to slates and bloc voting, it’s just a matter of people deciding they want to make it happen.

I’ll be giving everything in the Hugo packet a shot, even if that means I stop reading immediately after I see the author or publisher’s name. I’ll vote for what I think is award worthy and vote No Award before anything that isn’t, just like every year.

I personally hope that this debacle forces a rewrite of the actual Hugo rules to reflect the way voting is intended to occur. Regardless of the intentions of the slate-makers (and I personally deplore everything about “Rabid Puppies”) I just can’t sympathize too strongly with an organization losing its shit over people following their rules.

The nominees, on the other hand, have all my sympathy, congratulations and good wishes.

Like this:

Reader Interactions

Primary Sidebar

Search

Andersson Dexter: Book Four

After settling into a new job, new home and new living arrangements, Andersson Dexter has finally found a comfortable life in both the physical and virtual worlds. But that sense of security is blown apart when an explosion rocks Dex’s real-life Nice neighbourhood.

He and his colleagues begin an investigation into a string of seemingly senseless and random vandalism attacks, that remind them all of similar assaults in the simulated world Marionette City. While at first the attacks seem more like a nuisance than a threat, Dex discovers that there are more serious — even fatal — consequences.

Free Stories

last night I had
the most wonderful dream
Carly moaned softly in her sleep, and rolled over. She dreamed and dreamed, and when she woke, she found that she still had the lingering shadow of a … Read More... about Lucidity

I was balancing a cup of tea in one hand, while hanging on to the side of the companionway hatch with the other. I climbed into the cockpit sideways, compensating for the roll of the boat. I was only … Read More... about Major Tom and the Lucky Lady

This is a novelette that explores a different aspect of the world of the Andersson Dexter novels. You can get the complete ebook for free when you sign up to my mailing list.
It all started with the … Read More... about Fire. Escape. – Sample